• Question: could we bring a historic animal back to life

    Asked by JEDDY to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 17 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Possibly. The best hope seems to be the woolly mammoth, because frozen corpses of mammoths are quite often dug up in Siberia, and they could contain viable DNA; also, the Indian elephant seems to be quite a close relative of the mammoth, so a female Indian elephant could be a surrogate mother (and an egg donor) for an embryo mammoth made by inserting mammoth DNA into an elephant egg. I believe there is a genuine effort ongoing to do this.

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      We wouldn’t literally be bringing it back to life like they do in a hospital, we simply don’t have the technology to do that! But if we have some good DNA we should be able to use a set-up like Susan describes (think Jurassic Park!!). Additionally, we can use selective breeding to help this along the way. They tried this a while ago between zebras to bring back an extinct species called the Quagga. In 2005, they were successful at producing a foal that looked just like the Quagga in books and from preserved taxidermy samples. However, they were genetically different to the original because they didn’t evolve in the same way.

      There was talk a while ago of bringing back the woolly mammoth, but I don’t know how far they got. I’m not sure I really want great big woolly mammoths wondering around… 🙂

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